POV-Ray for Unix is well suited for automated execution, for example, for rendering diagrams displaying statistical
data on a regular basis or similar things.

POV-Ray can also write its image output directly to stdout. Therefore the image data can be piped in another
program for further processing. To do this the special output filename '-' needs to be specified. For instance:

povray -iscene.pov +fp -o- | cjpeg > scene.jpg

will pass the image data to the cjpeg utility which writes the image in the JPEG format.

The text output of POV-Ray is always written to stderr, it can be redirected to a file with (using a
Bourne-compatible shell):